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What Goes Down Must Come Up
What Goes Down, Must Come Up is the 33rd episode of The Venture Bros. and is part of Season 3. Plot The episode begins as Dr. Venture and Brock are in the Venture Compound Hangar, renovating an excavation vehicle left behind by Jonas Venture Senior -- it is a large metal car on treads, with a gigantic drill bit on the front. While Brock is driving the vehicle out of a garage, Dr. Venture falls through a pair of ancient doors, which the vehicle then falls partly into. Topside, the vehicle has completely blocked any access below, so Brock descends through a nearby door, which is nearly rusted shut. Oddly, the basement of the Venture Compound is largely abandoned and unexplored. Brock and Dr. Venture quickly get lost in the labrynthine sublevel, despite being in close proximity originally. Dr. Venture finds all the watch communicators are dead, but suddenly encounters a wild man that appears eerily similar to Keith Flint in The Prodigy's Firestarter music video. Meanwhile, Brock has entered a darkened control room, and is instantly attacked by a six-inch tall man wielding a needle. Almost immediately, the door closes, trapping Brock inside the darkened room. Topside, Hank and Dean have become suspicious of Brock and Dr. Venture's disappearance, and go into the Hangar to investigate. Being too afraid of the basement to descend and seek out the missing duo, they instead consult Dr. Orpheus for help, who in turn summons the other members of The Order of the Triad (much to their annoyance) with a chant that follow the same rhyming pattern as the Green Lantern's oath. Down in the control room, Brock manages to restore power and illuminate the room. The tiny man turns out to be Dr. Entmann, Dr. Venture Senior's onetime employee who has been trapped in the room for the last 30 years, barely surviving and fighting off marauding ants. Dr. Venture manages to establish communication with Brock via emergency wall phones, until he is captured by more subterranean lurkers -- a little girl and three men in suits (dressed as The Art of Noise). The Triad descends into the basement to find Brock and Dr. Venture. By combining their powers, they enable Orpheus to use telepathy to locate the missing men. He establishes that they are safe, and begins to locate them, until all members of the Triad get a horrible vision of an Atari 2600-resolution female face alternating with a demonic face. Terrified, the Triad retreats back to the surface. Meanwhile, Brock is working at the room's console to establish communication topside, but inadvertently brings the master computer (M.U.T.H.E.R.) online. M.U.T.H.E.R. is a HAL-like computer that shows the same computerized feminine face that spooked the Triad. M.U.T.H.E.R. instantly demands to speak to Dr. Jonas Venture Senior, and Dr. Entmann is terrified, telling Brock that this computer is completely irrational and dangerous. At this time, Thaddeus is brought into a large room filled with hordes of subterranean dwellers, all wearing tattered New Wave garb and costumes. They all refer to themselves as "Rusty," and worship a loop of Doctor Venture Senior's edu-bed lessons on personal hygiene. Dr. Venture, fed up over this nonsense, takes away the punchcard, and demands the dwellers take him topside, immediately. Instead, they set after him, and he flees for his life through the dark underground. Up top, The Triad has enlisted Pete White to assist with the recovery. Pete links into M.U.T.H.E.R. and tries to hack into the system. This backfires catastrophically, as M.U.T.H.E.R. foils the attempt and now threatens to launch a nuclear missile if Dr. Venture Senior is not presented to her within the hour. Pete White concedes defeat and cheerfully tells everyone they are all going to die. However, unwilling to accept defeat, the Triad tries one more tactic: they climb into the excavation vehicle and burrow into the ground. This leads them directly into the room where Brock is trapped, and they rescue Brock and Entmann, but are unable to stop M.U.T.H.E.R. from deploying the missile. Just at that moment, Doctor Venture flees from the outraged horde and hides in a dark room. It turns out the room is actually a silo holding the nuclear missile. The missile is launched by M.U.T.H.E.R. while Thaddeus haplessly holds on. Everyone watches the missile's emergence from the Venture Compound Command Console, helpless to stop it. However, seconds after it lifts off, the missile harmlessly plummets back to the earth and lands, unexploded, on the compound lawn to reveal Dr. Venture covered in human excrement. The basement dwellers have corrupted the missile's structural integrity through thirty years of using it as a toilet, rendering it inoperable. Later, Dr. Venture is bolting the bay doors closed, and explains to Pete White that the subterranean area was an abandoned bomb shelter. In 1978, Dr. Venture Senior conducted a guided tour for orphans who were members of the Rusty Venture Fan Club. During the tour, M.U.T.H.E.R. went crazy and filled the shelter with hallucinogenic gas. Jonas and M.U.T.H.E.R had gotten into an argument about how to treat the "survivors" living in the bomb shelter: Jonas felt that in the event of nuclear war, the survivors would be too depressed to continue functioning as a society, so he wanted to flood the shelter with low levels of hallucinogens for the first few days after its activation to try to medicate the survivors. However, M.U.T.H.E.R. angrily disagreed with this; Dr. Entmann explains that her response was comparable to "when your parents find you smoking a cigarette, and as punishment make you smoke a whole pack until you get sick": during the tour of the shelter Jonas was leading, M.U.T.H.E.R. released a massive overdose of hallucinogens into the bomb shelter. Jonas Venture led his team mates out in a hurried escape, abandoning the children. Over the next thirty years, the children grew up and "de-evolved" as a combined result of the hallucinogenic gas, and their only source of contact with the outside world coming through transmissions of "VH1 Classic" they picked up do to a wiring error with Dr. Venture's cable hookup. Meanwhile, Brock and Pete White have presented M.U.T.H.E.R. with Dr. Venture Senior -- as best they can -- by presenting her with the personal hygiene punchcard lesson. Cultural references * The supercomputer is named M.U.T.H.E.R. has several references: **It is a reference to the computer MU-TH-R 182 aboard the Nostromo, in Alien. **Visually, the supercomputer control room, the M.U.T.H.E.R. acronym lettering and the physical form of the computer itself (especially the slowly rotating, semi-spherical "eye") are references to the supercomputer "Colossus", from the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project. M.U.T.H.E.R.'s digitized voice and its potentially deadly insistence on speaking to its creator also recall a memorable incident in Colossus. **M.U.T.H.E.R.'s voice and maternal quality are similar to the Sandman computer from the 1976 film Logan's Run. The railcars under the Venture compound are visually identical to the "groundcar" from the 1977-78 Logan's Run television series.http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/logantv/cars.htm * Numerous visual references are made to music from the 1980s and 90s, as the Rustys have access only to VH1 Classic in the underground complex, and dress accordingly; several of them resemble musicians as they appear in music videos, including David Bowie's appearance as the pierrot in "Ashes to Ashes", Trevor Horn's appearance in "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, Michael Jackson's appearance in "Thriller", the "General Boy" character from Devo's "Jocko Homo" video, the actors from Art of Noise's "Close (to the Edit)" video, Doctor Fink from Prince's Revolution line-up, one of the Boys from Duran Duran's "''Wild Boys'' video", and Keith Flint's appearance in "Firestarter" by The Prodigy. The 3 Rustys in the shuttle car and the young girl with the makeup is a reference to the group Art of Noise. * Dr. Entmann is a reference to the Marvel Comic's character Antman, specifically Henry Pym. Brock Sampson goes as far as referencing Entmann's resemblance to a Marvel Comic's character, but he cannot remember the character's name. * Doctor Orpheus makes the Order of the Triad action figures from old Mego dolls- Jefferson Twilight's is a repainted Falcon and The Alchemist's is made from a Spock doll, with a bald spot. * Colonel Horace Gentleman sees a version of himself with a man in a rat suit, similar to the gentleman with the man in a bear suit from the finale of The Shining. Thereafter, blood pours through the tunnels, similar to the elevators from the film. * Kano's rapidly shaking head is based on a special effect popularized in the film Jacob's Ladder. * Jefferson Twilight mentions that he raises pigeons on his roof. The protagonist of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, another sword wielding black man, has the same hobby. * Doctor Orpheus' Triad Summoning poem is very similar to the Green Lantern oath. Production notes * One of the animation directors (Kimson Albert) has a "nickname" inserted into his credits. The nickname is an unusual line or word from the preceding episode. For "What Goes Down, Must Come Up" the credit reads Kimson "Blacktion" Albert. References What Goes Down, Must Come Up